As scandals engulfed the National Football League, The New Yorker magazine’s cover that appeared on newsstands last week showed a player being chased down the field by police officers.

During the height of the demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo., last month, its cover depicted protesters with their hands raised, illuminated by the harsh glare of floodlights.

And early this year, as the Winter Olympics got underway in Sochi, Russia, the cover lampooned Vladimir V. Putin as a figure skater being assessed by five judges — all of them Mr. Putin.

Those three images, among others, signal a shift in The New Yorker’s cover art toward the topical and provocative.

For most of its existence, the magazine specialized in covers that its current editor, David Remnick, characterized, with some notable exceptions, as “a lot of abandoned beach houses, bowls of fruit and covers reflecting the change of seasons.”

At The New Yorker’s Midtown offices, a wall of covers arranged in chronological order shows a distinct change in tone. Today, the magazine’s covers, which have been drawn or painted by artists each week since its founding in 1925, frequently reflect, or subvert, the news.

The turning point is around Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Remnick said, when The New Yorker ran a black cover with a black silhouette of the twin towers, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning artist Art Spiegelman, who has long collaborated with his wife and the magazine’s art editor, Françoise Mouly.

Since then a number of The New Yorker’s covers have made headlines of their own. Several stood out during the 2008 election, including a drawing of Sarah Palin looking out her window in Alaska with binoculars, trying to see Russia in the far distance. (The cover paid homage to Saul Steinberg’s famous 1976 cover showing Manhattan at the center of the world.) Another cover that year, titled “The Politics of Fear,” showed President Obama in Arab dress, fist-bumping an armed Michelle Obama. The Obama campaign called the cover “tasteless and offensive.”

The job of the magazine’s cover artists, Mr. Remnick said, “is to go too-far-enough.” His job, he said, is to decide what can decently run, and when the right time is. “We’re hoping for pieces of writing and art that have lasting value,” he said.

News illustrations, Ms. Mouly added, have the power to “make sense in two weeks, or two months or in 200 years as well.”

Barry Blitt, 56, is one of The New Yorker’s most prolific and fastest artists. He has done more than 80 covers since 1994, including those of Mr. Putin and the Obamas. He has resisted figuring out precisely what makes a good subject for a cover for fear of becoming too formulaic, he said.

But, buoyed by Ms. Mouly’s instruction to never censor himself, he often tries risky topics — like beheading — even if they are later rejected as too insensitive. He has also had to draw fast. Sometimes, Ms. Mouly or Mr. Remnick will present an idea with as little as a day left before the print edition is published.

“I’ll just send in a bunch of sketches, as many as I can,” he said. “Then she’ll very politely ask for more.”

His most recent cover — showing police officers pursuing a football player — came after Mr. Remnick asked for an image reflecting the N.F.L.’s troubles. The sketch took several different forms in simple black-and-white, and then in color study, before the final drawing was completed and sent to the printer.

“There’s a certain absurdity you can get with a pen and ink line, which if you rendered it another way, with photography maybe, the idea dies,” said Mr. Blitt, who works out of his studio in Roxbury, Conn.

On the wall of Ms. Mouly’s office are dozens of covers that did not quite make the cut, for reasons of taste, significance or just because of a feeling. (Tucked among them are depictions of Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor and artistic director of Condé Nast, which also owns The New Yorker.) Other rejected images, some of which are included in “Blown Covers,” a book by Ms. Mouly, include one of Lady Justice, holding her scales, but wearing a bondage ball gag, to reflect the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

“I think what David and I are aiming at is that you don’t know what the cover next week will be,” Ms. Mouly said. “We have the privilege, because we don’t do a political cover every week, to only do it when we have something good.”

(This week’s cover, by the artist Christoph Niemann, is a New York scene unconnected to current events. But in a first, it will be animated online.)

Ms. Mouly was hired by Tina Brown, the former New Yorker editor, in 1992, shortly after she took over the magazine. The covers at the time, Ms. Brown said, “had become pallidly decorative,” partly because William Shawn, who had run the magazine for 35 years, until 1987, believed they should be “a restful change from all the other covers.” Ms. Mouly brought a different sensibility and “a whole new roster of artists,” Ms. Brown said, many of whom, like Robert Crumb, Chris Ware and Lorenzo Mattotti, had been published in a comic book art magazine, Raw, that Ms. Mouly and Mr. Spiegelman had run.

“Many of them were doing their own paintings, or commercial art or selling overseas,” Ms. Brown said. “They didn’t have a market here. Really The New Yorker is one of the few billboards left for cover art.”

Ms. Mouly was inspired by the very earliest covers of the magazine, under its founding editor Harold Ross, who ran images that reflected the concerns of the era. While there are endless jokes about butlers and maids, she said, those covers “gave me a sense of what it was like to be a sophisticated jazz-era person, because of the humor, because of the distillation.”

She hopes that her covers will someday have a similar impact. Her goal is to “try and take a series of snapshots that can be looked at by the art director in 2030 and give a sense of what it was like to live in New York now.”

Correction:

An article on Monday about a shift in the tone of The New Yorker’s cover art from polite to topical referred incorrectly to one of the more provocative illustrations the magazine has published recently. The image of a football player being chased down the field by police officers appeared in the issue dated Sept. 29, which was on newsstands and online last week; it did not appear “a few weeks ago.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Shift From Polite to Provocative. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe